My friend Ronbo alerted me to the demise of Tapwave, makers of the killer Zodiac PalmOS PDA [zodiacend, zodiacreset]. This was not unexpected (see Last Sign of the Zodiac), but is still sad. I wonder what will happen to all of the Zodiac-accelerated apps? Will Novarra still make the nweb [nwebreview, nweb, nwebcache] browser available to current Zodiac owners?
The Zodiac was originally marketed as a game machine, but never had a meaningful game library available. Instead, the combination of PalmOS 5.2 along with gaming features such as the horizontal form factor, the incredible Sony LCD screen, and ATI graphics acceleration turned out to make the Zodiac the best, and most well-rounded multimedia PDA available.
I have yet to buy a Treo because my combination of Zodiac + Cel Phone works so well. With Tapwave out of business, now I just hope my Zodiac doesn't break!
Eerily, just after I heard the news about Tapwave, my Zodiac crashed and did a hard reset. Fortunately, it still works fine.
There is an excellent new input hack for the Zodiac [zodiacend, zodiacreset] (and other full screen PalmOS ![[WikiPedia]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
devices) called Virtual Thumbboard. When you press a configurable trigger button such as the right shoulder button on the Zodiac, a virtual thumb-sized keyboard reminiscent of the Treo 650 keyboard appears on-screen. The keys are remarkably easy to use. Come to think of it, Virtual Thumbboard is the fastest PalmOS input method I've ever used, and I'm pretty skilled at writing in Palm graffiti.
Note that Thumbboard is still in early beta. While it works well with most of my apps, it also crashes SnapperMail and Xiino [xiino3.4, xiinodead, xiinooffline]. The developer is very active and responsive to feedback, however, and I'm sure he'll fix the crashes before the app goes final.
As much as I like my Thinkpad X40 [thinkpadx40issues, thinkpadlenovoupdates, thinkpadreference, thinkpadx40] laptop (from IBM, not Lenovo), the quality just doesn't seem as good as my old Thinkpad X24. As I find various issues with the X40 that I don't like, I'll add them to the list below.
more to come…
Recently, my cable modem service from Comcast suddenly felt a bit snappier. I remembered that they were planning to bump my service to 4Mb downstream, 384Kb upstream, so I wanted to test my current connection speeds. While I like the bandwidth meters over at http://www.dslreports.com, I don't like the fact that they require Java.
Fortunately, there is an excellent DHTML bandwidth meter over at Speakeasy.net, and it appears to be very accurate. Try it out!
My results:
Download Speed: 4255 kbps (531.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 337 kbps (42.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Caught on Digg
There is an incredible amount of misinformation about video games being disseminated by the media and narrow-minded politicians regarding Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas . Perhaps some of these ill-informed talking heads should spend a few minutes reading Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked, written for PBS by the highly respected Dr. Henry Jenkins, professor and director of comparative studies at MIT.
I would then recommend actually playing GTA:San Andreas before forming an opinion. Aside from the boring opening, terrible target-locking controls, and tedious mission failure / restart states, the game is quite fun!
Most news feeds have reprinted the same generic obituray for James "Scotty" Doohan, but the most insightful one I read was in the Washington Post.
The real tribute to James "Scotty" Doohan, 39 light-years after he first saved the USS Enterprise's heinie (and did it many times over), is that it's now almost impossible to have a boyfriend or husband who can't do a somewhat reasonable impression of Doohan's famously stressed-out burr: "We've got nuh powrrrr, Cap'n!" Or "She cannuh take much moor."
Today I replaced a 3.5" floppy drive, a DVD-ROM drive, and a CD-RW drive in my WinXP machine with a single drive: the NEC DVD-RW ND-3520A. This drive reads and burns all current formats of DVD and CD media. I am able to rip entire albums (such as The Swinging Guitar of Tal Farlow ) to WMA Lossless files in less than 3 minutes.
Since WinXP has no built-in DVD writing software, I downloaded some excellent free software called CDBurnerXP Pro. So far, it has been reliable, easy to use, and fast.
Interesting note: The CPU temperature in my PC dropped ~5 degrees after removing all of the old drives. I assume this is because of better air flow and fewer heat-generating devices.
I've been using the Novarra nWeb [nwebreview, nweb, nwebcache] browser on my Zodiac quite a bit lately. It is truly an excellent and stable PalmOS application. Of course, that doesn't prevent me from finding a nitpick or two. 
The nWeb browser insists on backing up the web page and image cache during every hot sync. Over USB 1.1 or Bluetooth , this takes nearly 30 seconds for the standard 1 MB cache. 30 seconds during a quick hot sync feels like an eternity - it nearly doubles the time a normal hot sync takes.
Even if I use a file utility like FileZ to turn off the cache backup bit, nWeb forces the bit to be reset after each browser use.
The only way to prevent cache backups is to set the "Clear cache on exit" option in the nWeb preferences menu. While acceptable, this does prevent the cache from preserving it's state between browser sessions.
I tried to leave feedback about this on Novarra's web site, but the web feedback form produced Microsoft ODBC errors when I clicked the submit button. ![:-\](/images/blog_buttons/disappointed.gif ":-\"){kind=small}
All in all, this is a minor nitpick, and I still consider nWeb to be a "best of breed" PalmOS application.
I contacted tech support at iambic Software regarding software lock-ups with Agendus Mail [dumpingagendus, buyingagendusmail] on my Zodiac. They replied within 2 days, offering an apology and assuring me that my issue would be escalated to the engineers. Alas, that was the last I heard from them. Agendus Mail has been a total hassle from the purchase process to the usability. Rather than deal with iambic again, I've decided to ask Handango for a refund. I had a good experience with Handango support in the past, and I'm anxious to see if that continues.
I don't recommend buying Agendus Mail for PalmOS, and I would think hard before ordering software from iambic again. iambic used to sell great software for classic Palm devices, including TinySheet, which I still use to this day. But along with TinySheet, iambic has abandoned or provided terrible support for many apps that I've purchased, including FastWriter, iambic Office, iambic Mail, and now Agendus Mail.
There are many PalmOS e-mail alternatives, including the highly rated SnapperMail software. My demo version of SnapperMail was better than Agendus Mail in every respect, except that it couldn't hot sync with Outlook mail. In exchange for reliable software, I can certainly live without an Outlook sync feature.
If you are a member of Amazon Prime, you can get free 2-day shipping on everything your order from amazon.com. That is, provided you click the correct button when you place your order. Prime members see buttons like this on amazon.com ordering pages:
If you click the "Two Day 1-Click FREE" button on the top of the page, you get free 2-day shipping. But if you click the "Buy now with 1-Click" button in the "Ready to Buy?" column, your items might get shipped via standard slow-boat shipping (as happened to me this week). What gives?
A note buried in the Amazon Prime FAQ explains, "If you use the standard 1-Click button on the right-hand side of product detail pages, please verify the default shipping method for the shipping address. You will need to change it from Standard Shipping to Free Two-Day Shipping to take full advantage of your Amazon Prime benefits."
Why doesn't Amazon change this setting for Prime members automatically? Why would a Prime member ever want standard shipping?
When I first tried to rip a DVD to an AVI about 5 years ago, I had to write a script that would run nearly a dozen utilities in a sequenced process. It would take so long to complete the process that I would leave the script running overnight, and hope that no errors occured.
DVD ripping software sure has come a long way since then. PalmFocus has an article about ripping movies using software called FairUse. FairUse is a simple wizard-style app that converted a DVD of mine to a small AVI file in about as much time as it took to actually watch the entire movie.
Being able to watch my DVD collection on my Tapwave Zodiac using the TCPMP media player is a really cool experience. Hats off to the developers of FairUse and TCPMP.
The San Jose Mercury News launched a series of blogs recently, including a gaming blog from writers Dean Takahashi and Mike Antonucci. Whether you agree with their game opinions or not, the blog is interesting.
However, if you try to subscribe to the gaming blog RSS feed… well, you can't, unless you want to read every blog entry for the whole newspaper. Apparently, the Merc is using FeedBurner to serve all of their new blog feeds, and they only serve a single RSS feed that includes every single one of their blogs. I find it amazing that the newspaper at the heart of Silicon Valley can't figure out how to split up RSS feeds on a per-topic basis. Get a clue, Merc, that's the point of RSS.
If you have an Amazon Associates account, you know that you can serve images from amazon.com on your own web site. But did you know that you can also alter many of those images? Aaugh.com (a Peanuts fan site) lists the many ways you can manipulate amazon.com images, such as rotating, adding drop shadows, using alternate images, and adding text overlays.
In the past 8 weeks or so of crunch mode [crunchmodelifestats, crunchblogging, crunchmode3], I've managed to:
However, during the same period of time, I've somehow managed to buy:
Strangely, this same crunch mode experience happens to many other people I know. We all seem to buy things we absolutely do not need during crunch. In my garage, I have a half-dozen boxes of unopened power tools that I bought during crunch mode last year. All I can guess is that I was either dreaming of a life where I could work with my bare hands, or perhaps scheming of a way to build a secret escape hatch in the floor of my office.
Starting this year, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is planning to replace every power meter in their territory with a new, remotely controlled power meter. According to sfgate.com, the new meter is actually a node on a vast new powerline network called Advanced Metering Infrastructure. This PDF file explains some of features of the new powerline network, including realtime web monitoring of your power usage, dynamic billing cycles (instead of fixed monthly rates), and data communication over power lines. Most interesting to me, it may also include a local LAN port that allows end users to connect and regulate thermostats and high-energy usage appliances.
I've been using an original Microsoft IntelliMouse ever since it was released. I love the non-mechanical infrared tracking. However, one thing I've always hated with the MS Mouse is the ergonomics. Although the shape of the mouse is comfortable, each button is edged with a sharp plastic seam, which does a wonderful job of shaving your fingerprints.
Microsoft has made plenty of improvements to the IntelliMouse since I bought the original one, but my new mouse is a Logitech Mx500 . This is the most comfortable and ergonomic mouse I've ever used, even compared to the more expensive Logitech "Laser" mice. The shape is perfect for right-handers, and each button has a smooth rounded bevel that allows your hand to glide from click to click. The bonus "cruise" buttons above and below the mouse wheel are intuitive and an excellent alternative to using the mouse wheel for scrolling.
The Logitech Mx500 is also a perfect match with my Saitek Gamer Keyboard. What a combo!
There aren't many better ways to spend a Sunday in July than to sit in the stands and watch Barry Zito pitch eight innings for an Oakland Athletics win.
To increase revenues, the A's are planning to build a new baseball-only stadium in the next couple of years. While no one yet knows the location (or city) of the new stadium, I'll always love summer afternoons at the Oakland Coliseum. Even after the construction of the concrete monstrosity known as Mount Davis (the triple-decker stands named after Raiders owner Al Davis), the Coliseum is still a great place to watch a ball game. Great views from every seat, easy access to BART and the freeway, and best of all, fantastic summer weather, all make for great baseball experience.
Hopefully the new A's ballpark will be as stunning as the park used by our cross-bay rivals...
I have a WinTV-D HDTV tuner card that I bought several years ago when I was experimenting with HDTV reception at my house. I no longer use it, but I decided to throw it in my Linux box. Eventually, I'll see if I can get it to work. Until then, here are the chips on the card for reference:
Quiet computing used to be an underground hobby for people fed up with whining fans, buzzing monitors, and screaming hard drive platters. Thankfully, quiet computing has now become a mainstream selling point for modern computers. Witness the latest Dell Dimension 5100 and 9100 series PCs, with "quiet performance" listed as a main feature.
Recently, I purchased a Seagate Barracuda 80GB hard drive (the ST380011A). The Barracudas are well-known to be quiet drives, and I'm really impressed with mine. The noise level of this drive is so low that I can't measure it with my sound pressure meter. The only noise I can hear is the subtle chatter of the drive heads, and that can be mitigated with a Silent Drive enclosure, if desired.
Power Supplies can be extremely noisy. I was once fooled by an Enermax advertisement for their supposedly "Silent" power supply. The fans in that thing roar at over 35db. I replaced it with a totally silent Nexus PS, which is rated at <20db. Like the Seagate drive, the fan noise is not measurable with my sound pressure meter.
For CPU and Video Card cooling, I avoid fans altogether and buy Zalman heat sinks. Zalman makes heat sinks and heat pipe coolers for most mainstream CPUs and video cards. While they can make your hardware run a bit hotter than normal, the temperatures are well within rated operating levels.
I've had good experiences buying quiet components from http://www.endpcnoise.com and http://www.siliconacoustics.com/, but quiet computing has become so popular that I've even seen Zalman components at major retailers like CompUSA.
Did you know that persistent noise in a working environment is a known cause of stress?
Wow, I only managed to write 12 posts in the month of June. Gotta love crunch mode [crunchmodelifestats, crunchmode3]...
